Alexander Jablokov's Blog, page 14

Lighting each story with the embers of the last

In my new stint of writing, I have so far been successful in having one story thought about and ready to be started as I come to final words of the last. Some days I have even finished one story and started the next in the same session.

This is a great way to keep the work flowing. But it does require that you have a story ready and thought about when the last one reaches THE END.

But tomorrow morning, when I get to my desk at 5:30, I won't! I finished a story this morning, and thought I would...

An explanation for opposition to female schooling

One thing we see in religiously fundamentalist cultures is an opposition to female schooling. This comes up in the news most often about Moslem fundamentalists, but is part of other fundamentalist traditions as well. The usual explanation for this is the kind of non-explanation about how these people just want to keep women down, women are threatening to their worldview, something like that. Those things might very well be true, but seem inadequate.

A couple of days ago I was listening to Russ...

Dozois's Best SF 31: my story

The Gardner Dozois anthology The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection came out a couple of days ago. It has one of my stories in it, "Bad Day on Boscobel", set in the same universe as my novels Carve the Sky and River of Dust. It comes from the wonderful anthology The Other Half of the Sky, edited by my friend Athena Andreadis.

As I've mentioned before, Athena is the reason the story exists to begin with, since she asked me to contribute to the anthology, and then,...

My definition of satire, from Readercon

I was on a panel on satire at Readercon last night, and, in response to something my fellow panelist Him Morrow said, I came up with this definition of satire:

"The goal of satire is to describe the Emperor's New Clothes in so much detail that anyone can see they aren't there."

Writing, and teaching writing

There are a lot of excellent teachers of the craft and trade of writing out there, particularly in my genre, fantastic fiction. Many writer friends of mine teach writing, either occasionally, or as their main money-earning career. On Thursday and Friday I was up at Jeanne Cavelos's Odyssey Writing Workshop, in New Hampshire, where I was a guest speaker for a day.

I have always been reluctant to add that particular arrow to my professional quiver, for a few reasons. First is the fact that there...

How big is your comfort zone?

Big news from the Gray Lady today: even crayfish get anxious when you shock them. They become less willing to venture out and discover new worlds and new civilizations. After being given a nice Librium, they relax right down and start getting down with exotic alien maidens....

I was just sitting around minding my own business....

The real question is, when is the menace of researchers administering electric shocks to anything that moves, and many things that don't, going to end? I mean, look at...

Image search serendipity

Often, when you text search a movie title for images from that movie, you see a few iconic images, images from a 70s remake, images of the actors in other movies, images from lists of similar movies, etc. And then there are always the oddballs, images that have some matching text associated with them, but that don't have anything to do with the topic of the original search.

When I wrote my little piece on "The Narrow Margin", I of course searched on the movie title. And, among all the various...

This week's arrogant rewrite: "The Narrow Margin"

Many lists of great minor noir movies includes the 1952 train-centered The Narrow Margin, where a tough cop from LA is sent to Chicago to secretly escort a mob moll, Mrs. Frankie Neal, back by train so she can testify against her husband's gang. Gangsters get on the train to find her and kill her. The movie is usually described as tight and suspenseful, and, at 71 minutes, goes by fast.

Still, I think it is overrated, for reasons I will go into. People really like it for one thing: the perform...

Fat Boy's Folly

In college I wrote a story called "Fat Boy's Folly" to entertain my friend Bill. I don't actually remember what the story was about, but Bill later put that title on the weight track sheet he had on the wall above his scale. Somehow, though, I don't think I could have competed with Weight Watchers with that title for a business. Tough Love for the Tubby. Nah, that wouldn't work either.

A couple of nights ago, Marilyn, Sherri and saw a more recent version of Fat Boy's Folly, this time called Th...

WhyKly?

People who don't like doing something often try to "improve" it, that is, make it more into something they think they might like more.

Bicycling is a perpetual target for people like this. They say that the problems with commuter bicycling are sweat, the clothing, the physical effort, the exclusivist attitude of those who already do it. Usually they come with some way to make bicycling more like a form of transportation they recognize. This usually means adding a motor.

The latest overhyped ent...